Overall and Final Verdict
With all of our testing finished, how does the Asus Prime RTX 5070 fair? The Prime RTX 5070’s styling is the same as I saw with the Prime RTX 5070 Ti and it might not be for everyone but I like the simple blacked-out look. Asus managed to give it a unique look with the radiused top edge and then used the combination of textured and gloss finishes to add discrete branding on it. There isn’t any RGB lighting, it doesn’t have too much going on, and being black it will match most builds. Even while pulling some of the features back the Prime RTX 5070 has a full-sized aluminum backplate, the only thing missing is a matching black PCI bracket in my eyes. The only issue I had with the card design was with the placement of the 12x6 power connection which is facing directly up and can be an issue in cases without much headroom causing the connection to be strained. They did recess the plug down into the card slightly and the card itself isn’t too large, but I would still love to see it angled to avoid the issue altogether. For size, it isn’t huge like the TUF Gaming model but also isn’t compact like the Founders Edition. Given how well it performed in our noise testing and how much it improved for cooling compared to the Founders Edition it looks like it could be the sweet spot for the RTX 5070 unless you are aiming to do overclocking.
Performance-wise, even with the same stock clock speed the Prime RTX 5070 did manage to improve on the Founders Edition's performance in a lot of our tests. This is most likely related to the improved cooling performance. It also moved up in our power efficiency charts with its better Time Spy Extreme score while also pulling 10 watts less than the Founders Edition when doing it. The extra performance wasn’t significant and it wasn’t enough to pass any of the other cards but a little extra performance at the same price and clock speed is always a good thing. Overall it performed how you would expect. The 1080p and 1440p performance was solid, you can even game at 4k as long as you aren’t cranking ray tracing up too much. It fell in between the RTX 4070 SUPER and the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. In our in-game testing, it did average out ahead of the 4070 Ti even when not figuring in our DLSS 4 tests. I wouldn’t recommend a 5070 for someone looking to upgrade from a 40 Series card, but you do get a nice improvement if you are currently using an RTX 3070 or 3060. Ray tracing and DLSS is where a majority of the improvements have been made. If you haven’t seen DLSS 4 you might want to check it out. Multi frame generation doubles up the performance you saw with DLSS 3 and model improvements have DLSS looking a lot better and smoother.
As always pricing always makes or breaks a card and the Prime RTX 5070 is Asus’s MSRP-focused card so it has the same $549 MSRP as the Founders Edition. Unlike the FE it will be available for sale all over, not just at Best Buy. But as I spoke about in the Founders Edition review, it’s hard to say if you will be able to find any of the MSRP cards after launch. Demand is high across the board and supply isn’t meeting that demand on any of the 50 Series cards. With these being a little more obtainable price-wise, I hope that changes. That said I did put together a graph that breaks down the current pricing combined with Time Spy Extreme performance. You can see almost every card currently has a price significantly higher than its MSRP which is skewing the chart. We don’t know where the 5070 will be in a few days so it only has its MSRP. But at current pricing, it is only behind the RX 7600 score per dollar, and with MSRP only the 7900 GRE tops it. Of course, that could completely change when AMDs new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT hit the market in two days so if you aren’t dead set on the 5070 itself you should wait and see. Asus has those in a similar Prime model as well.
Live Pricing: HERE
